This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There are two kinds of beauty, one being of the soul and the other of the body, That of the soul is revealed through intelligence, modesty, right conduct, Generosity and good breeding, all of which qualities may exist in an ugly man; And when one's gaze is fixed upon beauty of this sort and not upon that of the body, Love is usually born suddenly and violently." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
"A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
"Relationship is a mirror. Wherever you are related with a person — a wife, a husband, a friend, a lover, an enemy — a mirror is there. The wife mirrors the husband. You can see yourself there, and if you see an ugly husband, don’t try to leave your wife — the ugliness is in you. Drop that ugliness! This mirror is beautiful, and be thankful to this mirror. But stupid and cowardly people always escape and renounce; brave and wise people always live in relationship, and use it as a mirror. Living with someone is a constant mirroring around you. Every moment the other reveals you, exposes you. The closer the relationship, the clearer is the mirror: the more distant the relationship, the mirror is not so clear." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you." - P. J. O'Rourke
"You can use that power for the preservation of beauty, of health, of vigor, of all that can make you attractive to others. You can also unconsciously use the same power to make you ugly, unhealthy, weak, diseased, and unattractive. The more you use this power in either of these directions, the more will it make you ugly or beautiful, healthy or unhealthy, attractive or unattractive; that is, as regards unattractiveness for this one existence. " - Prentice Mulford
"In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie." - R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
"If a white cloth is stained even with a small spot, the stain appears very ugly indeed. So the smallest fault of a holy man becomes painfully prominent." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"Once or twice I have tried to talk to film people about my ugly heroine. I explain to them the extraordinary psychological fascination of the medieval legend of the Loathly Damsel, whose splendor of spirit is confined within a hideous body, and she becomes beautiful only when she is understood and loved. I advise you not to talk to resolutely Hollywood minds about the Loathly Damsel. Their eyes glaze, and their cigars go out, and behind the lenses of their horn-rimmed spectacles I see the dominating symbol of their inner life: it is a dollar sign." - Robertson Davies
"The truth hurts like a thorn at first; but in the end it blossoms like a rose." - Samuel ha-Nagid, born Samuel ibn Naghrela or Naghrillah
"There will be mistakes in divinity while men preach, and errors in governments while men govern." - Dudley Carleton, fully Sir Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester
"No man can be a good ruler unless he has first been ruled." - Russian Proverbs
"Purpose without power is weakness; power without purpose is fatuity." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The Cause of Women is generally the Cause of Virtue." - Samuel Richardson
"You see how it is, my dear friends. There's no pleasing everyone. It's hopeless to even try, and the more you play the peacemaker, the less peaceful things become." - Sholem Aleichem, pen name of Sholem Yakovf Rabinowitz or Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich
"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines." - Simone Weil
"To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
"Once a cat has given its love, what absolute confidence, what fidelity of affection! It will make itself the companion of your hours of work, of loneliness, or of sadness. It will lie the whole evening on your knee, purring and happy in your society, and leaving the company of creatures of its own society to be with you." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
"Marriage is a microcosm of the soul’s descent into this world: If you are here looking for what you can get out of this world, then the world and all its trappings will only drag you down. But if you are looking for what you can give, then you, your part of the world, and your soul, all are uplifted and filled with light. So too, when you enter a marriage: Look for what you can give, and reap harmony and love." - Tzvi Freeman
"He has an opinion of how each person should be, how each thing should be done. Those who follow his choreography are his friends, those who dare dance their own dance are his enemies; and few, if any, are left without a label. In truth, he has neither enemies nor friends. He has only himself, for that is all that exists in his world. “If you don’t want to be so lonely,” we tell him, “make some room for the rest of us.”" - Tzvi Freeman
"Puts all heaven in a rage." - William Blake
"Fanaticism soberly defined, is the false fire of an over-heated mind." - William Cowper
"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"We therefore need to know the gifts given us by God, so that we may use them, for by these we shall be saved." - Walter Hilton
"Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it." - Wendell Berry
"One can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality." - Wendell Berry
"I always thought it was better like a lot for one person, a little for everyone." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
"Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends. We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently we'll integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The cleverness of the human mind has led us to the complex, horrifying, and all-encompassing crisis that we now face. The familiar solutions, based on a limited view of what a human being is, continue to fail, to be pathetically inadequate. Yet we pour vast resources into these tired solutions and feel that if we achieve a grand enough scale, the old solutions will meet the new challenges. Do we have the courage to see failures as failures and leave them to the past? Do we have the vitality to go beyond narrow, one-sided views of human life and to open ourselves to totality and wholeness? The call of the hour is to move beyond the fragmentary, to awaken to total revolution." - Vimala Thakar
"The essence of religion is the personal discovery of the meaning of life, the meaning of truth. Religion is related to the unconditional, total freedom that truth confers on us. It is a revolution of the whole way of living. Religion moves us from the superficial layers of existence and encourages us to go deeper to the roots of life. It is an inward journey to the depths of our being." - Vimala Thakar
"Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?" - Victor Hugo
"The beautiful is a necessity...To scatter joy, to beam with happiness, to possess amid sombre things an exhalation of light, to be the gilding of destiny, to be harmony, to be grace, to be prettiness, is to render a service. Beauty does one good by being beautiful." - Victor Hugo
"What you fellows call progress moves by two motors, men and events. But sad to say, from time to time the exceptional is necessary. For events as well as men, the stock company is not enough...seeing a comet, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself is in need of star actors." - Victor Hugo
"We should make efforts to acquire right knowledge and refrain from violence." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"One scabbed sheep will taint a whole flock." - Turkish Proverbs
"I always remember that America was established not to create wealth—though any nation must create wealth which is going to make an economic foundation for its life—but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal. America has put itself under bonds to the earth to discover and maintain liberty now among men, and if she cannot see liberty now with the clear, unerring vision she had at the outset, she has lost her title, she has lost every claim to the leadership and respect of the nations of the world." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Skip dominates most conversations in a negotiation and nobody questions the veracity of what he's saying it's the world according to Skip," - William Morris
"Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?" - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"During the hot months it is a great delight to sit on the veranda, enjoying the cool of the evening and observing how the outlines of objects gradually become blurred. At such a moment I particularly enjoy the sight of a gentleman's carriage, preceded by outriders clearing the way. Sometimes a couple of commoners will pass in a carriage with their rear blinds slightly raised. As the oxen trot along, one has a pleasant sense of freshness. It is still more delightful when the sound of a lute or flute comes from inside the carriage, and one feels sorry when it disappears in the distance. Occasionally one catches a whiff of the oxen's leather cruppers; it is a strange, unfamiliar smell, but, absurd as it may seem, I find something pleasant about it. On a very dark night it is delightful when the aroma of smoke from the pine-torches at the head of a procession is wafted through the air and pervades the carriage in which one is travelling." - Sei Shōnagon
"If you marry a monkey for his wealth, the money goes and the monkey remains as is." - Egyptian Proverbs
"There is something fluid about [packs] during the course of any individual manifestation. [p. 127]" - Elias Canetti